How To Improve Your Inner Voice - Ethan Kross

Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind, a Professor at the University of Michigan’s Psychology Department and Director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. There will be one voice with us throughout our lives, the one that exists inside of our head. So we'd better make friends with it. Improving self-talk and creating a nicer inner-monologue is something that everyone could benefit from and thankfully that's been Ethan's life's work. Expect to learn why we have an inner voice at all, how our age and gender influences mental chatter, whether it's possible to quieten the mind, the most effective strategies for dealing with negative self-talk, how to be more objective and less lost in thought, the relationship between language and quality of life and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on Upgraded Formulas Test Kit at https://upgradedformulas.com/ (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy Chatter - https://amzn.to/3yNDbaJ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #selftalk #mindset #psychology - 00:00 Intro 00:15 Why Do We Have an Inner Voice? 06:56 Controlling Our Thoughts 16:30 How the Mind is a ‘Beautiful Mess’ 26:15 Inner Voices in Different Ages & Genders 30:00 Is it Possible to Quieten the Mind? 36:08 Impact of Trauma on Inner Voices 40:46 Speaking in Third Person 47:28 Why Are We Harsher to Ourselves? 52:02 Tips to Control the Inner Voice 1:01:45 Positive Affirmations 1:04:00 Ethan’s Highest Impact Strategies 1:10:46 How to Know if You’re Lost in ‘Chatter’ 1:15:21 Where to Find Ethan - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Ruminati è un giro di rumore sul passato, preoccupazioni è un giro di rumore sul futuro. Ma fondamentalmente, se ti trovi in una giro di pensieri cercando di lavorare su un certo problema, ma non stai facendo progresso, è un indicatore che lo stai vivendo.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Perché abbiamo un voto interiore in realtà? Puoi spiegare perché possiamo sentire i nostri pensieri in testa?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Sì, è una bella domanda. Quindi, mi piace pensare al voto interiore come una sorta di scialla armata svizzera del cervello. È un tool, ci permette di fare molte cose diverse.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Cose che io... Perché non me lo dici come essenziale pensi che alcune di queste cose che ci permettono di fare siano? Quindi, prima di tutto, quando uso il termine "voto interiore", quello di cui sto parlando è la capacità di usare silenziosamente il linguaggio per riflettere sulle nostre vite. E parliamo silenziosamente di noi stessi per varie ragioni diverse. Una cosa che mi succede molto è che vado al supermercato e sono pagato da mia moglie e figli per prendere vari prodotti. Inevitabilmente, arrivo al supermercato, inizio a camminare nella fila. Di solito è la seconda o terza fila e mi dimentico di cosa devo prendere. E quando succede, inizio a parlare a me stesso, inizio a pensare cosa devo prendere. E poi mi listsco i prodotti: noci, cioccolato, pezzo di cibo.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Quello che sto facendo è usare il mio voto interiore per mantenere un nugget di informazione attivo nella mia testa. Il nostro voto interiore è parte di quello che chiamiamo il nostro sistema di memoria lavorativa verbale. Questo è un sistema della mente umana che è specializzato per permetterci di ripetere informazioni in una giro. Oggi le persone non memorizzano più i numeri telefonici, ma eravamo così. Hai mai fatto così quando eri più giovane?

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  Sì, voglio dire, posso... Ci sono forse due o tre numeri telefonici che non ricordo. Il mio numero telefonico a casa e il mio numero telefonico di mio padre. Ma quando mia mamma ha avuto un telefono mobile, io avevo un telefono. Quindi, non ho mai dovuto ricordare il suo, ma posso ricordare il mio padre. Posso ricordare i miei partner di business anche. E la ragione per cui posso ricordare è perché ho sentito la macchina di risposta per lui mentre eravamo a scuola e era ancora dormito o stava dormendo la notte prima. Quindi, sono i solo tre numeri che posso ricordare, ma sì.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Allora, in quel tempo, c'erano molti altri numeri che non ci riuscivamo a memorizzare. Ma se vuoi ripetere un numero di telefono in testa o incontri con qualcuno a una festa e vuoi non dimenticare il loro nome, ripeti di nuovo e di nuovo, è usare il tuo voto interiore. Quindi, la maggior parte delle persone si basano sul loro voto interiore per questa ragione. Ogni giorno stiamo usando questo in questa capacità.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  We also use our inner voice to do other things like simulating and planning stuff. Before people go on interviews, they often rehearse what they're gonna say in response to different questions they imagine. Before I give a presentation, I'll go over the talking points in my head. I'll usually go for a walk around the neighborhood or the hotel I'm staying in and I'll go from the beginning to the end. I'll go over the whole rigmarole. I'll imagine what a really obnoxious attendee, what question are they gonna ask me? I'll then imagine what I'm gonna say to them. Um, it's usually not very nice things that I say back. Um, I'm much nicer in person than I am in my head. We'll get to that maybe later. But, so we use our inner voice to plan, right? To simulate. We use it to control ourselves.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  When I'm exercising, if I'm in a class with an instructor or working out one-on-one, I'm smiling to that instructor, but in my head, when they're having me do painful things, I am saying all sorts of not-so-sweet things towards them. You son of a... I'm counting down. Come on, man, you know, seven more reps. Seven, six, five. That's me using my inner voice to coach myself along. We can also use our inner voice to critique ourselves. And then, and then finally, and I think this is one of the most special functions of the inner voice, we use it to make sense of our lives. Shit happens, and when that occurs, we try to make sense of that adversity. And we use words to, to, to create stories that help us understand what we're going

• 3:58Speaker 00

  through. And those stories we tell ourselves, really, they give shape to our sense of who we are. So your inner voice helps mold your, your identity. So those are four things that our inner voice does. Um, I think we're unique in our capacity to use an inner voice in that way. And I think it is a decided advantage that we possess, um, that, that capacity.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  It seems surprising to me. All of that sounds great. All of those things sound like fantastic advantages and yet, when you talk about your inner voice or when people discuss it, for the most part, they see it as an adversary. They don't see it as a compadre.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  That's right. Well, one of my favorite findings in psychology can be summed up by the following phrase. It's actually a title of a well-known paper. "Bad is stronger than good." And what that means is the bad stuff tends to stick out a lot more than the good stuff. And there's an evolutionary story about why that is the case. We need to be more attuned to potential threats and losses than gains from a survival point of view. And I think the same is true for our inner voice. I think we often take it for granted. I think we're not, we don't always stop and savor all of the benefits it provides when it's doing the things it has evolved to do.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  But when that inner voice runs off track, when it morphs into the kind of negative self-talk or self-dialogue, the inner critic perks up or one of my favorite descriptions, I write about this in my book, is Dan Harris, who describes his inner voice as an asshole. When the inner asshole starts yammering away, it really grabs our attention in ways that are uncomfortable. Makes it hard for us to think and perform, undermines our relationships and health. And that really motivates us to focus on that nasty inner voice and often to try to do something about it.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting, something I'd never thought of before. The negativity bias that we have where we focus on threats more than we do potential advantages. I never thought about that being a selection mechanism for the things that go through our own head.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, totally.

• 6:16Chris Williamson?

  That's really, that's really cool.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, the negative stuff is sticking out there. And you know, this is a found, as you may know, this is a foundational finding. The first, one of the first Nobel Prizes ever awarded for a kind of psychological research was given to

• 6:34Speaker 00

  A luminary named Danny Kahneman. And it was for this idea of loss aversion that we're more sensitive to potential losses in our lives than gains. The same basic finding generalizes to our inner world, much more sensitive to the bad stuff happening between our ears than the good stuff. It sticks around longer.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  How is it that we don't have control over our own inner voice? My arm doesn't choose to move on its own. It's not, it's not doing things against my will. It's not continuing to do the same stuff over and over again, even if I wanted to stop. Why don't we have control over what the voice inside of our head says?

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Well, I think we, I think we can and, and, and do. And, um, but you need to know how to engage, engage that inner voice. So let's talk about, let's break down the, the concept of control and what is under our control and what isn't. I think this is often a good place to start. So if you ask me, do we have control over the thoughts that pop into our head while we're awake, while we're asleep? The answer to that question is no, I don't think we do. And if we were responsible for all the thoughts that popped into our head, I think a lot of us would be imprisoned and in big trouble. Like, I don't know why, when I'm walking down the street, a thought, a dark thought

• 8:05Speaker 00

  pops into my head at times, like, I wish I did, but we don't. So we can't necessarily control the thoughts that pop into our head. But what we do have a lot of control over is how we engage with those thoughts, how we work with them, how we manipulate them, how we control them once they're activated. And that's really the, the territory that I and many other scientists like to play in, right? So once a thought is activated, how do you, how do you change its trajectory, right? So if you find yourself beginning to go down the rabbit hole of worry or rumination or catastrophization, how do you steer that internal dialogue into a different direction?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  And the good news here is that there are lots and lots of things that scientists have discovered that are useful for helping people do that. Ways of shifting your thinking, stepping back, thinking about your circumstances from a more objective perspective. We call these distancing tools. Lots of different ways you could get distance from your problems to think more rationally about your circumstances. There are people tools, there are ways of engaging with other people that can help you work through problems in ways that shift your internal dialogues. And there are also environmental tools, ways of engaging with our physical spaces that can be really helpful, too.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Going a little bit further back up the river of thought, I know that when we're talking about chatter itself, right, when it's manifested and we've become aware of it, we can then direct its control. But have you got any idea about where thoughts come from in the absolute first place, their pure origin?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Wow, that's a, I mean, that's a great, great question. They can certainly be triggered from external events that activate different kinds of associations from the past, or sometimes external events really demand our attention. And, you know, thoughts are often functional in the sense that they are helping us make sense of the world. And so if, you know, you're walking down the street and you see someone suspicious 15 feet ahead of you, you're going to have a certain set of thoughts activated that are designed to help you deal with that circumstance.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  In that particular instance, you'll also experience an emotional response in all likelihood that is functional, a negative response, right? Threat detected, and you're going to be alerted for dealing with it. We can also, though, activate thoughts.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Through thinking, and this is one of the ways in which chatter really sinks us. Lots of people think, for example, that stress kills, right? I mean, this is like a meme out there. Avoid stress. That's not actually true. As I like to point out, you wouldn't want to live life without being able to experience a stress response. The fact that you have a system, a coordinated system in your body, that quickly prepares you to respond to threats in your environment, to either approach or avoid them, super useful system to have. What makes stress truly toxic from a health point of view is when your stress response goes up and then remains chronically activated over time.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  It's that chronic activation of stress that exerts a wear and tear on your body that leads to things like cardiovascular disease and inflammation and all sorts of boogeyman-like physical disorders. And what accounts for that elevated chronic stress response is chatter. It is thinking, because we are capable of resimulating the things that are worrying us or bothering us, and when we do, that activates related thoughts and a biological reaction as well. So, so our thoughts can come from lots of different places, including places that we're not certain of, and I think it's important to share that with folks too, that, you know,

• 12:08Speaker 00

  the human mind is one of the most mysterious physical structures that are, that is out there, and we are trying to improve our understanding. I think we've made a lot of progress in shedding light on how the human mind works, but like there is a lot, a lot that we still don't know.

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, Sam Harris says, "If it wasn't for the fact that we are conscious, we would have no idea that consciousness exists out there in the universe," right? Aside from the fact that we're able to experience it firsthand, there is absolutely no evidence that shows that it's something that's occurring. And it's interesting what you talk about, the fact that you end up with kind of like a thought cascade. So, a thought can trigger a thought through an association, even if you don't know that those two things are associated. And then from there, our ability to ruminate perpetuates that. We are the architects of our own sort of cyclical thinking over and over and over again. When it comes to verbalizing thought, one of the things that I realized was that,

• 13:14Chris Williamson?

  given the fact that our inner voice uses words, does that mean that different languages can engender different thought patterns? I think German is one of those languages where they have tons and tons of words for things that we don't, perhaps in the West, like schadenfreude and things like that. That kind of enables a different type of thought, almost.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, there's lots of interesting connections between language and our experience of emotions. And it is absolutely true that certain cultures have words to describe emotional responses that we don't have in the United States, which raises questions about the universality of certain kinds of emotional experiences and the degree to which emotions are, emotions reflect these innate, natural kinds of phenomena, as opposed to more constructed

• 14:15Speaker 00

  experiences that our, our culture helps us, you know, make sense of. So in terms of the inner voice and language and foreign languages or different languages, some of the most relevant work here that I really love, this never made it into my book, that it got, it got, what's the expression, on the chopping room floor, but it's really cool science. It involves asking the question, how does talking to yourself about an emotional experience in a foreign language change your, the way you talk to yourself? How does it change your emotional experience? And what that research shows is that when we think about our emotional circumstances

• 14:59Speaker 00

  in a second language, we're able to think about them in a more objective way. Because...

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Our primary languages are the languages in which we first learn about emotion, experience emotion. Our second, the second languages that we learn are a bit, they're a little bit more clinical and abstract. If you ever tried, do you speak more than one language?

• 15:21Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I'm in Guatemala and I've, I've pulled every essence of Spanish that I can out of the half GCSE I did nearly 20 years ago in school and it's, it's been terrible.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  It's been tough, okay. Well, anyone who's listening, I would encourage them to, to try this exercise. Try cursing first in, in your primary language and then try engaging in the same curse words in your second language. Curse words don't have nearly the same sting. They're kind of funny sometimes to even utter them in a second language as compared to the first because they don't have the same associations. I mean, if you want to get back to this idea of associations, emotional memories are encoded in our primary language. So your primary language is, is really the terrain of very rich emotion and you can actually leverage this phenomenon to your betterment.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  If you're trying to work through a problem or some chatter, try to think it through in your second language and research suggests that you might be a little bit less emotional, more rational in how you do so.

• 16:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting, the, the effortfulness of having to think about what it is that you mean in a language that isn't your first language is probably going to provide some distancing, which I know we'll probably get on to. Another thing that I considered is that as you learn new or more words in, in your primary language, you're recreating the capacity of your inner monologue, right? You're actually enabling different ways for you to understand things and I suppose that you could then roll that forward to concepts. You learn a new concept like availability bias or Hanlan's razor or you learn about some sort of psychological trait that you may have or something like that.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  And it makes me think about what constitutes us, what constitutes me as a person. If I can learn a new word and then use it, and prior to not having that word, I was still me. And having had this word, I'm still me, but I consider the thoughts that are in my head to somehow be a part of me or a representation of me or something like that. What does it mean to add new words in? What does it mean that I can kind of augment myself with new language? All of that together seems like a bit of a messy situation.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Well, it's a beautiful mess, I would say, at least in the way I think about it. Because the mind is very flexible and on our ability to make sense of our experiences in this world. I mean, look, we can, we can create stories to make sense of almost anything, right? One of my, a classic study in psychology, have you ever heard of the cognitive dissonance discovery with the UFOs? And things like that, have you ever heard of the story? It's a great story. So Leon Festinger and his student Stanley Shacter, two, two major players in social psychology.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Basically, they wanted to understand what happens if people believe in something really, really strongly and are then presented with evidence that there's no getting around it. The evidence clearly says you are wrong in this belief. And then their question was a simple one. When you're presented with evidence that contradicts your beliefs, what do you do? Do you update your beliefs? Or do you come up with some creative rationalization to allow yourself to maintain these beliefs? And their prediction was a controversial one at the time, which is, they said, actually, when you're presented with undeniable evidence that you're wrong, that's going to be such a threat to your sense of who you are,

• 19:10Speaker 00

  that you're going to figure out a way of bending your, your, your mind to make sense of this new circumstance. And I think that that's one response I have to your, your question about the messiness of the mind. One thing that keeps that messiness in check is that we are motivated to be consistent in how we think about ourselves and the world around us. And so, yeah, we can learn new concepts and ways of thinking about things, but usually, we're not going to take those ideas and do a total 180 in terms of how we think about who we are and present ourselves to the world. We are going to maintain some consistency. Anyway, to get back to the detour of the, of that study I was telling you about.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  So, how does Schacter and Festinger test this idea about whether we take in the new evidence, update our ideas or not? They infiltrate a cult. These are, these are like professors and graduate students. They infiltrate a cult in Minnesota that believes in an alien race that has been visiting the planet for a while to see what's going on. And this alien race has determined that there's going to be this doomsday event on this particular day. And when this happens, if everyone in the cult gets, comes to this certain place, they'll be saved, go on the spaceships and go to the planet. I think it was Clarion,

• 20:31Speaker 00

  which is a little funny because there is a, a chain of hotels here in the United States that is called the Clarion Hotel. It's hard for me to take it seriously. Anyway, they've infiltrated the cult and they're there on the day when the aliens are supposed to come. And guess what happened, Chris?

• 20:48Chris Williamson?

  No aliens.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  No aliens.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  I should say, by the way, for anyone who's listening, I'm open to the idea of there being

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  Aliens that run a successful chain of hotels in America.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. Just not the ones that take this shape. So they don't come and, and then they, what is the, what do the cult members do? Well, turns out they just make excuses for this and that, well, you know, it didn't happen on the same, but it's going to happen three months from now. They make all, they're, they're rewriting this internal narrative that has been guiding them for all of this time, leading them to invest money in preparations for the migration and so forth and so on. So this observation was really the, the way we stumbled on this idea of cognitive dissonance, this idea that we really don't like to

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Admit we're wrong and really update ideas even when we're presented with information that contradicts them.

• 21:50Chris Williamson?

  Isn't the part of the explanation for how consciousness works or how identity works, the fact that we commit ourselves to those positions is because ancestrally it would have made a lot of sense for us to try and be someone that looks reliable, consistent, like they have control over their conscious processes and what they're going to do. If we were fully verbalizing all of the things that go through our heads, or if it was that we weren't actually as committed to the personality that we have, it would be chaos. Because the person that was a farmer yesterday has woken up and doesn't want to be a farmer today, he wants to be something else, wants to be a hunter. And you go, no, no, no, you're supposed to be that person.

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  And I remember reading about how it was supposedly adaptive for people to stick to their guns in that sort of a way, because it makes the behavior more predictable, which actually can cause a tribe to be, it coheses together in a more efficient way, because there's not constantly tons of flux as people change from one type of person to another.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's a very popular evolutionary theory, and it's one that makes a lot of sense. Evolutionary theories are always hard to completely...

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  Everything's just so, right?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard, right? Because you can't go back in time necessarily and do this, but it's a theory that does have some support behind it, and it makes good sense. What we do know is that human beings, we are highly motivated to have a sense of order and control. We like certainty. We like to know that the world is predictable, because when the world is predictable, it's easier for us to navigate. And that generalizes to our social relationships as well, right? We want to know that people are dependable, and so forth and so on. And so I think that does make sense. And look, the things happening in our mind, when we're pinballing back and forth...

• 23:52Speaker 00

  That isn't always a very controlled atmosphere inside. And you know, it's interesting in the age of transparency, I think people often, you could push it to an extreme, say, "I want to know everything you're thinking." In fact, some social media applications actually ask you to share what is on your mind. That's the prompt, or it was the last time I checked, on Facebook or Meta, or whatever it's called. I'm not telling people what I'm thinking all the time. There's a little bit of filtering that I'm going to do before I share it with someone else. And I think that filtering serves a really useful function.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  Can you imagine if we were to go into some Minority Report world in the future, where we were actually able to read people's thoughts? First off, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people who see themselves as the most virtuous would find themselves pretty close to the bottom of the pile. And also, you're right, it's strange, the fact that we have this odd cascade of thoughts, which can be triggered by thoughts and perpetuated by thoughts, means that we end up in, oh, what was that film? There was a film that came out where everyone's inner monologue was verbalized outside of their heads.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  The Jim Carrey film, was that the one?

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  No, no.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Sunshine of the Spotless.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  No, no, this one came out the last year or the year before. It's a dystopian.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  With Violet, there was one on the inner voice.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think so. It's about a dystopian future world where technology's crashed a little bit. It was within the last two years, this thing's come out. And they have, what do they call it? I think they might call it the voice, or the whisper, or something like that. And you can hear what everybody says outside of their heads.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Oh, really? What happens?

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's a nightmare, obviously, because no one can hide things. And the chieftain, one of this sort of totalitarian guy that looks after one of the big tribes, he doesn't have a voice. He's been able to control it. And then there's this kid who is the protagonist, and he really struggles. He's trying to talk to girls, and he's always saying how cute she looks and stuff like that, and he just weirds everybody out. And then over time, the journey is him learning.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Sounds like my childhood.

• 26:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe. Dude, you should watch it, it's right up your street.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  What's the name of, you'll have to...

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember, I'll send it to you afterward. People are screaming it into their headphones at the moment. What? How does age and gender influence chatter? Are there correlations there?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  So we know that chatter tends to be higher among women than men. There are two caveats I always like to provide after describing that statistic. Number one, there are many things that men, many problems of the mind or problems of living that men score higher on than women. So it all averages out if you look at the full terrain. But second, many of the tools that exist for managing chatter work equally well for men and for women. With age, you know, you could begin to see signs of, so the earliest study I was able to find that had some trace of inner voiceness occurring among kids was around 18 months of age. That's probably not the earliest that it occurs, but methodologically,

• 27:10Speaker 00

  it's hard to do this kind of research when you get much younger. But we see chatter, the harmful version of the inner voice, beginning to occur pretty, pretty early on. And, you know, young, school-aged kids start to experience worry and rumination, and it oscillates, it changes over the lifespan. It's also important to know that just because, you know, it's easy to bucket people into, hey, you're a worrier, you're a chatterer, and you're not. In fact, there are domains of chatter. Some people are really good about not experiencing chatter at all when it comes to relationships, but when it comes to their

• 27:51Speaker 00

  work-life, chatter, chatter, chatter, and vice versa. So there is a profile that characterizes people. What are your chatter triggers? Let me ask you.

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  God, dude, anything. I really do struggle to not think.

• 28:07Chris Williamson?

  I've done a lot of mindfulness, you know, five years or something, over a thousand sessions of meditation, and it's definitely made me be more aware and more intentional. So my ability to step into see, hear, or feel whatever it is that's arisen in the mind, and then to let it go, is, it feels like a superpower. It genuinely feels like a superpower, especially compared to the person that I was half a decade ago. But I find it very difficult to not notice things. So as I'm walking through a hotel, I'll notice that a woman has got one sock higher than the other, and I'll have to think about, why, why has she got one sock higher? Another thing to do with socks, it's not always to do with feet. I went to a party a couple of months ago in Austin, and people came into this house, this

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  very nice house where the party was, and they were told to take their shoes off at the door. And about 50% of people took their shoes off, and about 50% of people took their shoes and their socks off. And I was obsessed. The rest of the party, almost all I could think about was like, what bound together the sock people, and what bound together the bare feet people? And what was it about? Why was I one of the non-sock people? And what? That was, it's so-

• 29:18Speaker 00

  You're just, you're just, you're just a lay psychologist, Chris. You've just got to come to our PhD program here.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  We'll get you trained up.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  I knew that that was the case. And then we can do some foot analysis. We can find out what the inner monologue of people that don't wear socks when they go to a party is. So-

• 29:33Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  Talking about that, obviously, we can have different sorts of projections inside of our mind, right? We can project visual images. We can also have a hear sensation, so that verbalizing, inner verbalizing. And then we can have a feel, so sort of emotions, I guess, that are a little bit more ephemeral, and probably somewhere between the two. Is it possible to quieten the mind, or is it only possible to change what it's saying?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think they're often related. So when you're struggling with either imagery that is aversive and promoting chatter or a nasty internal dialogue, changing the trajectory of that dialogue or imagery is often linked with quieting the mind. And, you know, once you address the negativity, it becomes easier then to just move into a kind of autopilot mode. Now, I do think it's really interesting, and I'd love your take on this as someone who has experience with meditation mindfulness, which I do as well.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  And I genuinely, I was about to say generally, it's Friday afternoon, you know, it's that time of the day. I genuinely value mindfulness, meditation. I've been doing it on and off since I was five years old, believe it or not. But I do think that it is one tool among many that we can use to manage our minds. And further, I think oftentimes the way that some of the philosophical ideas that really have given rise to mindfulness, some of the way those ideas are promoted, actually distort the original intent. And what I mean by that is this, we often hear that the goal should be a quiet mind.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  The goal should be to be in the now, to be in the moment, to not be, to dip into the future or past. And actually, I think that that is not a realistic goal, nor one that we should all strive for, to be in the moment at all times. And what I mean by that is, the human mind is a time traveler. We evolve the capacity to travel in time in our mind. And this is a kind of superpower, I think you use that term. But me being able to think back to the last conversation I had, what went right, what went wrong, right? That's a source of self-improvement. Me being able to think about the vacation I recently went on with my family and savor that when I'm not having a great day.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  That's a huge source of resilience. Me being able to think about the next six months and what I want to accomplish. And the difficulties I may have on the horizon, how I'm going to deal with them. That's essential to my ability to be productive and successful. So traveling and time in our mind, when I go for a walk in the park, letting my mind go to these different places. I think this is part of the reason to the degree that I've had any success in this world. It's that capacity that plays an outsized role in predicting that kind of success. Sometimes, of course, the mental time travel machine breaks down and we get stuck in the past or the future, which is essentially chatter. One approach there is to refocus momentarily on the present.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  But that's only one thing you might want to do in that instance. I think we don't always want to be in the present. So I'm curious what you have to say. You know, what's your take on, do you think we should always be striving to be in the moment?

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult question because obviously it's not super adaptive for that to be the case. It wouldn't do for us to only ever be in the moment because we would never learn from things that we did in the past and we would never be able to anticipate challenges that were going to come in the future. It's interesting because the sort of bro-science mindfulness solution to everything is to just come back to the present moment. And yet I'm going to guess that if you dig into the psychological research, that's not necessarily always the best solution.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Well, I think the, you know, I'm a fan of there not being any one-size-fits-all solutions. I think we've evolved the capacity to utilize, you know, probably close to three dozen different tools, at least in counting right now, for managing our chatter for a reason. Different people, different situations require different kinds of tools. And so I think we get in trouble potentially by giving people what I think is an unattainable goal.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  It's not possible to always be in the moment. I mean, have you come across anyone who's always in the moment?

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  No, I've come across people that say that they're always in the moment, but I don't believe that they are.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, you know, just knowing about how the mind works, it's, we evolved to not be in the moment. And we've evolved for a reason. So, so it's, it's, it's setting people up to have an unattainable goal that is also not something that is functional. And so I'd rather, I'd love to shift the conversation to get us talking about being in the moment as one kind of tool we use to manage our chatter. But hey, there's a whole big toolbox out there of other skills that we, we can also activate.

• 34:55Chris Williamson?

  Is it true that some people don't have an inner monologue?

• 34:58Speaker 00

  No.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  I thought so. I thought, I thought that was bullshit.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  I, I get this question a lot and, and because every, every few months, someone usually writes on the internet that they don't have an inner voice. So this is where I think it's really important to be clear about what we mean when we use the phrase inner voice. And when I use that phrase, I'm talking about silently using language. And as I mentioned earlier, there are many, many contexts in which we call upon that tool, ranging from reminding ourselves of what's on our grocery list and memorizing a phone number to having a, a full-blown back and forth dialogue with ourselves. Are there some people who may only, only resort to that inner voice to

• 35:46Speaker 00

  keep in mind what they have to buy in the grocery store and don't ever talk to themselves? Sure. I think we lean on these different functions for, to different degrees. But in terms of do we have, do we all have an inner voice? Yes. That working memory system that I mentioned before, that is a basic feature of the human mind. All well-functioning human minds have it.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  There must be people that you've come across in your research who've had some sort of brain trauma or sort of genetic disformity that's caused them to not have it, though.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yes, those are no longer well functioning minds and they're fascinating. There's this one story I'm particularly fond of, a woman who suffered a stroke that was localized in the left hemisphere of her brain, a vein popped right around the parts of her brain, or parts of her brain that were involved in speech production. And so she temporarily lost the ability, not only to talk to other people, but also to use words to talk to herself. And what's fascinating about her story is, this is a woman who was very well accomplished. She was a Harvard neuroanatomist. And she would often, before the stroke, complain about all of the chatter she was experiencing.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  She described it as tremendously debilitating. She wished she could just get rid of her inner voice. Well, the wish unfortunately came true. But what's astounding to me about her story is, she ended up describing her experience in a book. When asked, how did she feel after she could no longer talk to other people and herself? She described it as euphoric. She described herself as going to La La Land. So you've just had someone who has had a massive stroke, can't communicate anymore to other people or herself, and she's blissfully happy. Why? Because although words escaped her, so did all of the chatter. And she found that incredibly liberating, right?

• 37:48Speaker 00

  No more obnoxious roommate in her head chirping away all the time, leading her to self-guess herself and focus on, you know, the people who wore socks versus didn't at the party. And so she found that really liberating. Now, she goes on to say that it actually was an impairment because although it was really nice to not have the chatter for a while... She couldn't do basic things like keep information active in her head or make sense of what was happening to her in the world. And so, so her experience is always a great reminder to me of how the goal shouldn't be to silence the inner voice, it should be to figure out how to manage it more effectively.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  I like that. Are you familiar with Ian McGilchrist's work, Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things?

• 38:35Speaker 00

  No, tell me more.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  So he, the thing that came up for me there was to do with the strokes. And he mentioned how, so he's a philosopher and a neuroscientist. And he looked at strokes that affect the left hemisphere and strokes that affect the right hemisphere. He said that for a long time, doctors had thought that strokes affecting the right hemisphere were preferable because you still retain speech, language, all that stuff. So communication's super easy. But what you don't retain is empathy, or the ability to understand why other people aren't happy with the things that you're doing, or motivation and intention and stuff like that. And it seems now that, given the choice, if you were to pick the

• 39:18Chris Williamson?

  two, it seems significantly easier to retrain language and to retrain forms of communication with a left hemisphere stroke than it is for the people who are around the person that's had the stroke to overcome the pretty difficult to deal with total lack of empathy, total lack of emotion. You lose more of who you are as a person and that, those interpersonal skills. Bizarrely, when you can't speak, you are in a better position than when you can't sort of feel feelings anymore. And I just thought that was, that was a really interesting way to look at things, that speech is less central to our personhood than the emotions that drive that speech.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's a fascinating question, and it sounds like having to choose between the lesser of two evils. If I have my choice, I'll choose neither. But, but, you know, I mean empathy, for example, and the ability to relate to others. I mean, the, some have described that as a, as a social glue that binds our species together. And when it goes away, um, you know, you don't always need a stroke in the right hemisphere to get a lack of empathy. There are some people who, for reasons we're still trying to figure out, don't have it. Um, we call them sociopaths and, um, things don't always work out very well for them.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  Should people speak to themselves in the third person if they want to motivate themselves?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely, provided they don't do it while walking down the streets of London without AirPods in their ears. Um, so, um, you know, one, one thing that we know from lots of research is that people are much better at giving advice to others than they are giving advice to themselves when they're struggling with something really emotional. I find it striking that whenever I give a presentation on this work and I ask people, "Hey, have you ever been in a situation where a friend or a loved one comes to you with a problem they're ruminating about? They don't know what to do. They present the situation to you and it's relatively easy for you to coach them through the situation." Has this ever happened? Every single hand in the hand in the audience goes up. Um, there's actually

• 41:33Speaker 00

  a name for this phenomenon. We call it Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon, who, as you probably know, was world renowned, um, for being a sage, for being a wise leader. But if you dig into his personal history, it turns out, he made a rash of terrible decisions that ultimately led to his demise as, as a leader. Um, he got caught up in not only love triangles, but love octagons and, and got into, you know, a, a huge hot mess. So, so there's this finding, right? We can coach other people better than we can coach ourselves. What we've learned over the years is that what we call distant self-talk, trying to

• 42:15Speaker 00

  coach yourself through a problem using your name or the second person pronoun you. So, come on, Ethan, you can do this. That's a tool that plays off this mechanism. Because if you think about when do we use names or words like you? We use names and second person pronouns when we think about and refer to other people. So the links in the mind between using a word like you and thinking about someone else is super strong. So when you use that word to refer to yourself, it's essentially turning on the the brain machinery for thinking about others. And that that that alters our perspective. It puts us in a position to start giving ourselves much, much wiser advice. So this is actually the first thing that I personally do.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  If I detect some chatter, all right, come on, Ethan. How are you going to manage a situation? What are you going to do? And and it often it often does make a difference. And there's a lot of science to back that up. Have you ever done it?

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I have. I have. I mean, you know, one of Jordan Peterson's rules is treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping. And I wrote a newsletter about that and probably two years ago now that said exactly what you went through, like, how many times has someone come to you with a problem and you've given them this really sort of wonderful blend of sympathy with firmness, with support, where it's this gorgeous blend and you sort of really sort of get them on their way. And a lot of the time, that's a situation that you yourself could do with that same advice for.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  And you'll you'll kick yourself in the dick as you push yourself out the door. Your equivalent is so much more ugly.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean, we say things to ourselves that we would never dare say to a friend, let alone a worst enemy. And and this is where distant self-talk, I think, really helps. It it greases the wheels for providing that kind of friend oriented advice, giving that to ourself. It's leveraging the structure of language to put us in a position where we start doing that relatively effortlessly and automatically. So you don't have to stop and think, hey, what would I tell Matthew in this situation? It's like, Ethan, here's what you're going to do. It just flips a switch. And we've actually done neuroscience studies on this.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  In one study, we find that the emotional regulatory benefits of this tool kicks in in about a second, actually.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  The switch is really, really quick. And you know, just try doing it yourself. I, you know, I, Chris, like. So visceral feeling that many people have. Um, you know, this, this tool has been around for quite a while. Um, I think it often gets ridiculed because we see it pop up in television sitcoms where people are being made fun of for talking themselves out loud about themselves. But Julius Caesar, Henry Adams.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  Didn't Julius Caesar write a whole book in?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, he wrote a whole book in the third person.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  A book about a difficult military exploit. Um, Henry Adams wrote his autobiography in the third person. Um, Malala Yousafzai, you know, the youngest person ever win the Nobel's Peace Prize. When, um, Jon Stewart, um, a host of a television show here in the States, or previously was, when he had her on the show to talk to her about, hey, what was going through her head when she discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her? She, she does this wonderful, she tells this wonderful, I mean, terrible, but also the way she tells it is wonderful story about discovering the, the news that the Taliban were coming to

• 45:57Speaker 00

  get her. And then the moment where she, she simulates what's going to happen when they get to the front door, she switches into coaching herself using her own name. Well, I used to say to myself, what would you do Malala if they come and get you? Well, then I would reply, just take a shoe and hit him. So she's, she's contemplating this tremendously stressful circumstance. And she switches into using her name to coach herself through it. There's something, we, some people stumble on this tool. And I think the value associated with knowing about the science surrounding is now, now you and anyone who's listening can just be more deliberate in how they incorporate it into their lives.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  Matt Fraser, world's CrossFit champion, won the CrossFit Games five times, most dominant athlete ever in its history. I, I saw an interview with him and he said that he always refers to himself in the third person. Um, and you know,

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time when we're doing stuff that we require sort of acute motivation for, I have three more reps to go, I have two more reps to go, I have one more rep to go. Or you're running, it's Memorial Day Mirth is a workout that often gets done. And people will need that because it's a one mile run followed by hell of sort of body weight exercises and then another one mile run. So as you're going through this run with a weighted vest and you're like, I'll just get to the next lamppost. For him, it would be, right, Matt, just get to the next lamppost, just get to the next lamppost. It is bizarre that we have this, it's not a negativity bias, although it is negative language.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  It's like a callousness bias or a lack of empathy bias that we have toward ourselves. Have you got any idea why that is?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Why do we say things to ourselves that we would never say to someone else? You know, it's a great question. Well, we don't have to stand on ceremony with ourselves. There are lots of norms. I mean, this is one hypothesis idea.

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  Grow science it, Ethan, come on.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. You know, there are social norms that dictate how we speak to other people and those norms are taught to us at a very, very young age, right? So we don't act in ugly ways. We don't necessarily even always speak the absolute truth about how we feel about someone else all the time. Sometimes we kind of dress it up to ease the blow or the burden that what we're going to say is going to have on someone. We don't have those norms for talking about ourselves. I mean, there's an interesting question here. Can you change the norms associated with how you talk to yourself?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Now, that's a really interesting question that I would love to see some research address.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Can you teach people to be kinder and more constructive to themselves chronically over time? Not just to be corrective about it when you find yourself being nasty, to remember to switch into this more compassionate mode, but can you actually train that?

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  It's like self-personal resocialization.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's really fascinating. I haven't ever really thought about it. I think it's a really fascinating question. Now, there is of course something to be said about being honest with ourself as well. And so, you know, when you describe, for example, what you wrote in your newsletter about that blend of compassionate, but also honest and stern feedback, that's not typically the way that people often describe certain types of self-compassion. Self-compassion is often described as more genuinely accepting of yourself as a human being, and it's great, great data associated with it.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  But I do think there is a case for the tough coach, so to speak, right? The drill sergeant that's going to also, when necessary, be straight with you about something that isn't working out. And there's a question of how to balance that.

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it the case that anything that you are exposed to a lot, you become desensitized to, right? Like when everything's racist, nothing's racist, but when everything that you do sucks, nothing that you do sucks. You need to balance that. You know, if we have this super negative mindset and you're never happy with any of the outcomes or the outputs that you've done, it's very, very difficult for you to then... where do you go from there?

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't always happen. The habituation, I think, is what you were saying. You just kind of get, you know, if you've seen one, if you see a snake 100 times, it's not like the first time. In fact, though... Sometimes where we get stuck is we don't actually habituate. We remain sensitive to the negative stuff. And that's in part, I think, where people get in trouble, right? It's because we are so adept at finding new ways to freak ourselves out. Like, we're really good at it, right? Like, you'd think, Chris, how many times have you worried or ruminated about something in your life? And learned that that outcome didn't happen?

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's ninety-nine percent of the time.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Yet you've continued to do it, and that speaks...

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  And it continues to trigger me.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  And it continues to trigger, exactly. That speaks to the flexibility of the mind and our ability to just keep on making ourselves...

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  Resilient against learning, yes. Impressively resilient against learning.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  And that's where the ability to take that step back and look at what we're going through from a different point of view can be really, really helpful, right? Because we just go down these scripts of churning stuff over and over and over again. Not productive. But when you step back and look at the bigger picture, think about it like, you know, you tell someone else. Or, you know, write a story or talk to someone who can help you put it in perspective. Those are different ways of attacking a problem that can change a trajectory.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  That third-person language distancing, is there anything else to add on to that, to augment with that? Is there anything we haven't said so that people can use that strategy?

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are lots. Let me give you a rapid fire. So, there's no one distancing strategy that exists. Turns out there are many, many different ways of stepping back, looking at the bigger picture and thinking about ourselves from a less immersed, more detached point of view. Another common distancing strategy that has a lot of science behind it, I use it myself, is called temporal distancing. Distancing through time. So, this is a tool I use every time I wake up in the middle of the night with some chatter. It happens every four to six weeks. It's like, I'm wide awake, oh my God, how is that gonna... What am I gonna do? You know, three seconds later, I'm visualing myself, visualizing myself either in jail or the hospital.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  It's not good. Temporal distancing. Think about how you're gonna feel about whatever you're struggling with the next day or the next week or six months from now. What we have, what we all know from just living life is that lots of emotional experiences, they come, but they eventually go, they subside. But when you are in the midst of, of, of experiencing chatter, we lose sight of that. So reminding yourself of the fact that, hey, I'm gonna feel better about this in the morning. I'm gonna be able to manage this in the morning. That, that does something really powerful for a chatter prone mind. It, it highlights the instability of what we're going through. It's saying, hey, there is, there is hope.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  And that, that takes the edge off in a way that can be quite, quite helpful. Super simple thing to do. I mean, this is another thing that excites me so much about a lot of the tools I talk about. There, a lot of complex science went into their identification and validation, but they're easy to implement. And, and the reason that I like that is the easier things are to do, the more likely people are gonna be to do them. So I have made a plan in my head. If I wake up at 2:00 AM, then I'm gonna use temporal distancing. I rehearsed that plan and now it's on autopilot. I do it instantly and I don't freak out as a result. So that's another distancing strategy.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Another one that plays on the visual modality is if you're seeing, if you're replaying a, a scene over and over in your head, adopt the fly on the wall perspective. See yourself in the event like you're looking at someone else and try to make sense of why that person you're looking, why are they acting the way they are? That's another distancing tool. Journaling, that, that can also help, that also activates distance. Talking to other people can be really helpful if you choose the right people to talk to. Someone who's adept at not only connecting with you empathically using, you know, hopefully not the stroke victims you were referring to before, but then also people who don't

• 55:04Speaker 00

  just get you to rehash what you're going through, but people who then help you broaden your perspective, right? A lot of us think that the way to give good support, to get good support and give it, is to just vent our emotions. What we know about venting is venting. Venting can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people. It's good to know that, you know, Chris, we're connected now and you're here for me. But if all I do is vent to you about something, I leave that conversation. I feel good about our relationship, but I'm just as upset as I was when I started talking.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  How do you define venting?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Just unloading, rehearsing what happened to you and what you felt, without trying to shift towards some cognitive change, some way of making sense of the experience.

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  What's the step to go from then? Someone catches themselves venting, what do they do?

• 55:56Speaker 00

  So what if you're, let's say you're in the role of being my chatter advisor, my coach. What you want to do is you want to, you want to learn about what I'm going through. Let's back up a second. People have two needs that they're trying to fulfill when they go to someone else for support. They have social emotional needs. They want to feel validated and connected with someone else. But they also have cognitive needs. They need to make sense of this problem they're dealing with in a way that lets them move on with their lives. And ideally, the person you're talking to helps address both of those needs. How do they do that? First thing you do is you genuinely empathically learn about what happened to the other person. So Chris, tell me what happened with that last podcast guest? Really, that sounds terrible.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  How did you feel? You know, learn a little bit about it. And then when you sense that the time is right, then you want to start shifting the conversation to move towards solutions and alternative ways of thinking. So, well, you've dealt with that kind of guest before, Chris. How have you dealt with it in the past? What have you done? Or I've been in that situation. Here's what I've done. Or, well, you know what? Big picture. This is one guest. And it's so lots of different ways you can broaden the person's perspective. Now, there is an art to doing this well. And what I mean by that is depending on the person you're talking to and what they're dealing with, some people will need to spend more time sharing their emotions before they're ready to transition into having their perspective being broadened.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  So you want to feel that out. So if my wife comes to me with some chatter she wants to talk about, I'll stop, I'll listen, and then I'll ask her, hey, I totally get it. I have a thought. Can I share it? Sometimes she'll say, no, keep listening. Other times, she'll say, please tell me. So, so that's the art of being a good chatter advisor.

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  I like the fact that you have asked the question, what do you want from me at this stage? Are you done feeling validated by me hearing what you have to say? Or do you want a solution? I had a psychotherapist on the show last year, Adam Lane Smith, and he was talking about the fact that men and women deal with their problems in two completely different languages. That women, he said, on average, appear to want to feel like they have been heard, like they have been validated, like their emotions are understood. And what men are trying to do from the second that this begins is, what's the problem? How can I fix it? Like, men are interested in things, women are interested in people, and the reverse happens as well. He mentioned about how male and female depression gets treated, too.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  That female depression is treated by making them feel safe, like they belong, like they are loved. And he's like, men don't necessarily want that. They want to feel like they have a purpose and the ability to achieve it.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I would say that there is some variability. So there is some research which shows that. So both of these needs, these social and cognitive needs, these are needs that both men and women possess. But there is, you know, so actually, some of this research, this was groundbreaking research done by a Dutch psychologist, no, a Belgium psychologist, I'm in big trouble now. We'll scrap that. A Belgium psychologist named Bernard Reme. And he actually tackled this question of, is it the case that women just want the emotional stuff and men the cognitive? And in fact, he found there was much more similarity

• 59:23Speaker 00

  than differences. So I think there's certainly those archetypes that exist. But I can tell you, I've got, I've got, you know, buddies calling me all the time, men, and they often want to vent a little bit. And I have to remind them, all right. Venting, you ready for the cognitive stuff or you want to keep? And so, so I think there's a lot of variability there.

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  But, um, so other people can be a remarkable tool, but I think a lot of us get it wrong. Um, this is myself included before I knew about this work. I think a lot of us think the way to help is to just do one or the other, just listen or just advise. In fact, it's a blend. But you asked me about other distancing tools. Let me tell you about one more. Um, it comes from the environment. I think it's super cool. It involves experiencing the emotion of awe, which is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable. And you can get this awe experience from lots of places, like some people get it from, um, exercising outside or like going for a walk in the park.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Some people get it from imagining their, you know, witnessing their kids doing some amazing thing. Um, I get it from, um, well, I get it from many places, but the last big one for me was watching the spaceship land on Mars, like just contemplating back to aliens, right? Like, my God, we figured out how to travel between planets. Like, that's amazing. And so what happens to your chatter when you experience awe is something equally remarkable. Awe leads to something called a shrinking of the self. We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. And when we feel smaller, so does our chatter. So to make that concrete,

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  you know, I could have, I, I wrote an email earlier today that might have been interpreted the wrong way. And I could be lost in that thought loop about, oh my God, what if they thought about this email? Or I could be thinking about the fact that there are people who figured out how to land a spa, uh, uh, an SUV sized vehicle on another planet and then have a live stream back to us. Like, come on, man. Put your problems in perspective. And I did a little distant self-talk there just to slip it in as well.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Very nice. I like that. Is there any science behind positive affirmations?

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  There's a lot of science between behind positive affirmations and it turns out that it is, um, it's complicated.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  Were you about to say bullshit?

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  No, no, self affirmations can be, can be useful in certain contexts, but, but they're not a panacea. And so they're not going to, um, be, you know, I, I, I think in general, one theme of my book of my work is there are no magic pills. And, and I don't think that's something to be, um, upset about. I think it is doing us as a species a disservice to think that these complex minds that we possess can all be just turned on or off, if you will, with respect to chatter by doing one thing or another. It's a lot more complicated than that. And I think, you know, self affirmations can help along with other tools.

• 1:02:44Chris Williamson?

  What situation is positive affirmations useful for?

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Um, that's a good question.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  If it's a temporary kind of stressor that you're experiencing, something that is not going to be a recurrent source of distress, somewhere where you need a little bit of ego inflation, that would be a, a good, a good instance to try that out.

• 1:03:10Chris Williamson?

  Rose Namajunas, who is, was the UFC strawweight females champion up until Saturday, when she had the most boring fight in the history of the UFC. She walks out to the, um, octagon saying, I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best. She says that over and over. And sadly, that absolutely didn't come through in her performance, uh, on Saturday. But that, I was interested by, would it be better if she was saying, Rose is the best? Um, that would have been an interesting, an interesting.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I, I, I definitely, I will say every, before I do any, um, you know, big, big, high stakes presentation, it's, you've got this, man. You've got this. It's third person. It's, it's me channeling my high school wrestling coach and what he would say to me before a big match.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Dope. I love that. So there's a ton of different strategies that you've got. We've gone through some of the distancing ones. What are, in your opinion, the highest impact strategies that people can do that we haven't gone through so far?

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  That we haven't gone through. Rituals, those are really useful ones. So many people report engaging in rituals, which are these rigid sequences of behaviors that are infused with meaning when they're stressed out or in high-performance contexts. And there's research showing that they can be very beneficial. They provide people with a sense of order and control, which is often lacking when we're experiencing chatter. They're often intentionally demanding. So they draw our attention away from our chatter. So try a ritual. It can be something your culture gives you or something you make up yourself. You just don't want to become too beholden to the ritual, where a ritual can get out of hand is...

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Rolls into superstition, doesn't it?

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you know, and a little bit of superstition's okay also, a little bit. But when it becomes something that you can't, that interferes with your ability to like live a quote-unquote relatively normal life in the sense that if you don't do this, you need to stop and go back to do it, because then it's becoming more problematic. So rituals are another good one. Creating order around you operates via a similar principle. I tend not to be very organized. In my home, you wouldn't know it from the background, but typically, if I turn my computer to the side, you would see mountains of papers and books. And, but when I have chatter,

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  this place is just in tip-top, perfect shape. Same principle here. When you're experiencing chatter, you feel like things are out of control. They're not ordered in your mind. Your thoughts are racing, pinballing back and forth. You can compensate for the lack of order you feel in your mind by creating order around you. And so that's another tool, very easy to use.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  Is that compensatory control? Is that what that is?

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Yes, that's compensatory control. It's one way that rituals, as well as organizing, can help people. Nature, exposure to green spaces, lots of compelling data showing that that can have restorative effects. So we know chatter consumes our attention. Try reading a book when you're worried about something. Good luck, right? You read the words, but you don't remember anything you've read. It's because the chatter's consuming your attention. Turns out... Nature, green spaces are like an energizer battery for your attention. They help restore it. And the way this works is when you go for a walk in a green space,

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  you're surrounded by, well, I should say a safe green space, not a place where either people or animals are going to come and get you. But if you go for a walk in a nice park or a tree-lined street, you're surrounded by really interesting, pleasant-looking things that gently draw your attention. The trees and the shrubs. And you're not really carefully studying the geometrical structure of the leaves. Maybe you are.

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  One second, mate. Can you come back in about one hour, please? One hour? Uno?

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Hour.

• 1:07:19Chris Williamson?

  Gracias.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:21Chris Williamson?

  Just wait. Yeah, no, no, no, no. If you... One hour? One hora?

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Una, una hora.

• 1:07:29Chris Williamson?

  Una hora?

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:31Chris Williamson?

  Gracias. See that? That is repurposing you through me, through the headphones, into Guatemala. Cheers, mate. What were you saying? We're in nature.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Um, nature can, can help restore our attention. And the way it works is, uh, when you're in nature, you're surrounded by interesting things that, that gently draw your attention away. And, uh, so funny.

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  For the people that are just listening, the, um, the lady that's come to try and clean my hotel room has decided that not only did I want her in one hour to come back into the room, but I also wanted one agua, una agua. So she's just delivered me a bottle of water right to the desk.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  Hey, you asked for it, man.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, but I didn't mean to. Bloody hell. Okay, yeah, nature. Um, another, here's something that I learned about, actually, the other day. Um, I, I read that looking at the sky through a tree, through tree branches, there's some, um, restorative effect for our brain because of the, the crisscrossing pattern of the branches that typically in nature, we wouldn't see straight lines, you know, like the edges of buildings and stuff like that.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  There's some, so there's just some fascinating work, this is.

• 1:08:51Chris Williamson?

  Is that not, bros? I haven't, I haven't pulled that out of my ass? Is that, is that legit?

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  No, there's actually, there's actually work that's.

• 1:08:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, I knew it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  That, um, so some of this work actually.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Has really tried to drill down into the ingredients that explain how nature helps us and looking at, does it have to do with the irregular? There are a few straight lines in nature. So there are curved edges and ragged, you know, jagged edges. And all of that kind of gently draws our attention towards it in ways that that can be helpful. So no, very, very good. Fine. You're reading widely. Interestingly enough, it's not just these. The way that nature helps us isn't restricted to the visual modality. There's also work showing that natural sounds, like hearing the chirping and the, you know, the, the leaves crinkling in the fall.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  All of that also has that restorative benefit as well.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  What do you, what do you mean when you say restorative?

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Restorative. So attention is limited. We only have so much of it. And oftentimes we need our attention in order to manage our chatter. Right? We've got to think like, think differently about what we're going through. Reroute the, the dialogue. Well, if we have no attention, it can be hard with no energy, if you will, mental energy to engage in those cognitive exercises. It's, it's, it's really challenging. I mean, that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to deal with chatter in the middle of the night. Because your brain or parts of your brain are effectively asleep, being recharged, right? So you don't have access to those attentional resources that you would during the day. So if chatter is wiping out your attention,

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  then it stands to reason that if you could get some replenishment, that should help you. And that's what the nature work shows.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the triggers that you use or that you advise? So that people can become aware when they've been lost in chatter? This to me seems like sort of the, the first mover. It's like the first step in this.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Step one is knowing what chatter is, having a vocabulary for understanding what's happening to you, I think is incredibly important. Ruminati is chatter about the past, worry is chatter about the future. But fundamentally, if you find yourself in a thought loop, trying to work through some kind of problem, but not making any progress, that's an indicator that you're experiencing it. Step two is to recognize that there's actually things you can do to manage that chatter. I find it remarkable how many people think, don't realize that they have agency in this situation, that there are actually things they can do. There's this one study looked at teens and asked teens,

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  how much, you know, are you able to control your emotions essentially? Forty percent thought that they couldn't. Forty percent. So what happens if you don't think you can control something? You're not going to take any steps to actually try to do it. So having the expectation that you can in fact manage your chatter, I think, is enormously important. That's step two. Step three is familiarizing yourself with the tools. There are lots of them and you gotta know what they are if, if, you know, to give them a shot. It's like if you want to train your physique, you gotta know what are the exercises that you use to get in shape, right? You could just stare at the machines all you want. If you don't know how

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  to use them, nothing is gonna happen. And then the final step is to start doing some experimenting with the tools. What science has done a really good job of doing is identifying the tools, profiling how they work in a very careful, fine-grained way. What we have not yet done, we're starting to do it now, it's gonna be a while. We haven't figured out how to prescribe sets of tools to different people. Like Chris, you come to me with a problem, the sock dilemma. Could be the chapter of my next book, the opening story. I don't know how to give you, like, I can't give you six tools to deal with the sock fiasco and then give my buddy Fred three different ones for the, you know,

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  flower episode that they're dealing with, right? We don't have that level of understanding of how different tools interact for different people in different situations. So while we're waiting to do that science, the invitation I like to give everyone is to start self-experimenting on your own. I've identified like four to six tools. They work really well for me. Like the moment I detect the chatter brewing, I implement those tools usually, it nips it in the bud. But those, those sets of tools that work well for me, they're different from the ones my wife uses. She uses three or four other ones and that's okay. So start that self-experimentation process.

• 1:13:46Chris Williamson?

  How can people deal with the frustration when someone falls prey to chatter that they think that they've supposedly been working on and trying to improve? There's this sort of second order self referential, "You were supposed to be past this, you shouldn't be at the mercy of this, blah, blah, blah."

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Well, that's a good question. What I would suggest is, is remind yourself that you're not alone. I think normalizing these experiences can often be really powerful. And what's, what's been really astounding to me over the past couple of years, having a chance to talk about this work with lots of people who have achieved some level of success, is the remarkable frequency with which they all struggle with these kinds of experiences at times in their lives. Like, I have yet to meet someone who doesn't struggle with chatter to some degree in their lives. I think it's part of being human.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  And so if your chatter happens to deal with the same thing that you thought you've conquered before, so what? You know, give it another go and, and, you know, try to get it under control. I think beating ourselves up excessively about things doesn't do much good. Being a little critical with ourselves for short periods of time when we screw up, that can be useful. But beyond that initial, "Hey, you messed up, now let's figure out how to do better", beyond that, you don't want to get stuck there.

• 1:15:18Chris Williamson?

  Ethan Kross, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they find you online?

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  www.ethancross.com is the best way to find me and I'm on social media, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn as well.

• 1:15:34Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I really appreciate your work. I think it's great. I think the defeating the learned helplessness that people have inside of their own minds is, is a really important piece of work and I'm super excited to see what you come up with over the next few years.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me. Really fun, stimulating conversation and looking forward to having some more down the road.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.